New Features

Feature

Description

IBM Software

Amazon EC2 now allows you to use proven IBM platform technologies with which you’re already familiar, including IBM DB2, IBM Informix, IBM WebSphere sMash, IBM Lotus Web Content Management, and IBM WebSphere Portal Server. There are two options. You can pay by the hour only for what you use, through Amazon EC2 running IBM. Alternatively, you can bring your own IBM licenses to run on Amazon EC2. Either way, you can leverage Amazon EC2’s flexible and reliable environment to seamlessly integrate with features like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Elastic IPs in both the US and EU Regions.

Amazon EC2 now supports an additional pricing option. With Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances,
you can make a low one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and receive a significant discount
on the hourly usage charge for that instance.

Known Issues

Windows AMIs take longer to launch than Linux/UNIX instances due to larger AMI sizes and multiple reboots.

Windows AMI sizes

Installing software on Windows AMIs can cause them to become large and easily reach the 10 GB limit. Before bundling, check the size of the C:\ volume.

Limitation on drive mapping

There is currently no support for volume attachment to devices beyond /dev/sdp on instances running Linux/UNIX and xvdp on instances running Windows.

Security group limitation

AuthorizeSecurityGroupIngress does not allow port ranges for group grants when using the command-line tools or the Query API. This is only supported through the SOAP API.

Instance limit

New users are limited to a maximum of 20 concurrent instances, but many of our customers use hundreds or thousands of instances. If you need a higher limit, go to http://www.amazon.com/gp/html-forms-controller/ec2-request.